کتاب 06-13

13

“We were all marked. The first lines appeared on Nick’s arm and back. Three days later we looked like we had all gone to the same tattoo parlor in hell. Except for Sarah. In the space of seventy-two hours, Sarah had to face the idea of losing her son, her daughter, her sister, her father, and her boyfriend. You’d expect a person to quit functioning.

“But she didn’t quit. Her children still needed her, and as long as they could feel and think and be comforted, she was set on being whatever they wanted her to be. Besides, for a couple of weeks she assumed she had the infection, too, and just wasn’t symptomatic. I think when she finally realized she didn’t have it, she was more upset and shocked than she would’ve been if she did. How could every one of us have it except her? She got mad at me a couple times, as if it were my fault she wasn’t crawling with Dragonscale. Why all of you and not me? That’s what she kept asking.”

“She was in the pool,” Harper murmured.

“Figured it out, did you? Yes. The poisoned ash fell from the sky and we all got it on us, but Sarah had gone swimming. The chlorine killed the spore, or at least created a barrier against it. In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower or wisdom or pluck. It’s just a matter of where you’re standing. Two inches to the right and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don’t make it out in time.

“Sarah put off grief. She put off a nervous collapse. I don’t know how she bore up, but she did. The only time I saw her nearly hysterical was when her father said we should all book ourselves into the federal quarantine in Concord. The thought of her children being taken from her was like being prodded with hot sticks. We had to back off. I think we were all afraid of what she might do to herself if we created a situation where Allie or Nick might be yanked from her life and never seen again.

“For a few days Allie stayed curled up in a ball, just crying. Then one morning she came out of the bathroom with her head shaved and announced she was all done being sad. That night her mother and Allie did ’shrooms together. The next night, Sarah and Allie snuck out and stole a car. They were deranged but happy. They looted a costume store. Sarah came home as Hillary Clinton. Allie took a Captain America mask because she liked the big ‘A’ on it. They thoughtfully brought a Tony the Tiger mask for Nick. I said I always wanted to be a fireman and next time I hoped they’d think of me. Two nights later they stole an antique fire truck from the parking lot of a museum full of classic cars and all the fireman gear that was inside it. They had to park it in the boathouse at Camp Wyndham, just to have a place to stick it. Allie was determined to raise some hell before she died and Sarah felt it was important for a mother to support her daughter’s goals in life.

“I didn’t think Carol would last long. I remember that. She dropped ten pounds she didn’t have to lose. She stopped sleeping. She’d watch TV, half naked, for twelve hours straight, as insensible as someone who has had a lobotomy. She smelled like a lit match and was always seeping smoke. The only thing that could bring her out of her miasma was her father, who made sure she ate and slept, and otherwise tended to her needs.

“Then one morning I heard banging doors and screaming in the street. It was early and I was the only one up. I crept down the walk and looked out over the hedge. They had a lorry pulled up in front of a house down the street, a police van that had been pressed into service by Quarantine Patrol. Some SWAT types in gas masks were wrestling a woman into it. They had a doctor with them, in a mask and gloves, carrying a clipboard, and telling her this was for the protection of her own children. Telling her they would contact an appropriate relative to come and collect the kids. A boy of about four was sobbing his eyes out, trying to follow them. Another member of the Quarantine Patrol kept taking him by the shoulder and turning him around. Somewhere inside the house I could hear a baby shrieking. Just before they shoved the woman into the truck, she turned her head and I saw her face. It was the same lady who had been weeping on the curb the day the drugstore went up in flames.

“That afternoon, we had a family conference around the dining room table and I filled them in on what I had seen. Allie said we needed a plan, in case they came back and knocked on our door. Tom said if such a thing happened, the best thing we could do was not be there to answer it. He said he had spent every summer for the last forty years at Camp Wyndham and saw no reason to change his plans now, and never mind summer camp had been canceled. He said he had been over to camp with Carol once already and there were enough dry goods on hand to feed an army for a decade. He was only off by nine years.

“He settled into the house that had always been his, supposedly with Carol to look after him, although it was really the other way around. Sarah and I claimed a cabin close to the boathouse, because Nick liked to play fireman on our stolen fire truck. Would it sound strange to say those were lovely days? We had fresh eggs then, waffles, and coffee. We had swims at dawn and campfires at dusk. Sarah dusted off the organ in the church and played Billy Joel and Paul McCartney. She tried to get her sister to play with her, but Carol stayed in the House of the Black Star, her ’scale smoking and fuming. Waiting to die.

“One morning Sarah went into Portsmouth to get news and groceries. She could shop for us, she wasn’t sick. She came back with the Neighbors girls. Two days later, Norma Heald showed up on her own. She had worked in the cafeteria in summers past and thought it would be safer to look for food here than in a supermarket. That was the beginning of Tom’s people.

“A few days after Norma showed up in camp, Carol came flying out of the House of the Black Star, looking wild, almost incoherent with terror, found Sarah, and said it was happening. She said to come quick. She said Tom and Nick were lighting up—that both of them were about to burst into flame.

“We ran so hard and fast we left Carol behind. We ran sick and scared. You can’t imagine what it’s like to run so hard toward something you don’t want to see. Like running toward your own firing squad. I was sure we’d find both of them withered and blackened, the house afire.

“Sarah burst through the front door and then stopped so suddenly I ran into her and knocked her down. Allie was right behind me and tripped over the both of us. We were all tangled together on the floor when I saw them.

“The dishwasher in that house has to be older than you, Harper. It had seen almost three decades of service, and thumped and shook when it was turned on. The beat, if you can imagine it, is very like that old song ‘Wooly Bully.’ You know that one? Tom sat with his back to the machine and Nick in his lap and that Wooly Bully thump going through the both of them. Tom had his fingers laced through Nick’s and he was singing and the both of them were shining. Tom had his sleeves rolled back to show the ’scale on his forearms, and it was as brilliant as swirls of glow-in-the-dark paint.

“It didn’t bother him at all, watching us crash in through the doors like the Keystone Kops. He gave us a laughing sort of look and went right on singing. Sarah said, ‘Oh, Dad, oh, God, what’s happening to you?’

“And he said, ‘I’m not sure, but I think the Dragonscale likes Sam the Sham. Come and sing with us and see if you don’t like the way it makes you feel.’

“By the time Carol came through the door we were all sitting together in a circle by the thumping dishwasher, singing garage rock and lit up like a carnival. As soon as the Dragonscale started to warm up and glow you knew you were all right. That you weren’t going to burn. Well, you know what it’s like in the Bright.

“We sang until the dishwasher finished its cycle, and as soon as the machine quit thumping, our Dragonscale began to cool and go dim. We were all so high. I couldn’t remember which of Tom’s daughters I was dating, so I kissed both of them. Sarah had a laugh at that. Allie kept counting her toes, because she couldn’t remember how many she had. I guess you’d have to say we were good and baked. Baked! Ha! Isn’t that clever? Isn’t it—no? Ah. Well.

“We gathered the others in the chapel that evening. Sarah sat at the organ and Carol tuned her ukulele and they played ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ and ‘Let It Be’ and we lit up like sparks blowing from a bonfire. Their voices were so smoky and sweet. I have never been so drunk or so happy. I could feel myself letting go of my identity, the way you might put down a heavy suitcase you no longer need carry. It was, I imagine, how bees feel. Not like an individual at all, but like one humming note in a whole world of perfect, useful music.

“After we were all sung out, Tom spoke to us. That seemed natural. He told us things we knew but needed to hear. He told us we were lucky for every minute we had together, and I knew it was true. He told us it was a blessing, to be able to feel each other’s love and happiness so intensely, right on our skin, and I said amen, and so did all the rest of us. He told us that in the darkest moments of history, kindness was the only light you had to find your way to safety, and I know I cried to hear him say it. I feel a little like crying now, just remembering it. It’s easy to dismiss religion as bloody, cruel, and tribal. I’ve done it myself. But it isn’t religion that’s wired that way—it’s man himself. At bottom every faith is a form of instruction in common decency. Different textbooks in the same class. Don’t they all teach that to do for others feels better than to do for yourself? That someone else’s happiness need not mean less happiness for you?

“Only Sarah did not shine, because only Sarah did not have the Dragonscale. But she knew as well as the rest of us that we had solved something. That we had found a working cure. We didn’t need a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. The sugar was the medicine. Sarah sang with us, and watched us turn on, and kept her own counsel. I had been with her long enough by then that I should’ve seen what was coming. What she would do.

“But I didn’t see what was coming because I was drunk most of the time. Not drunk on booze, you understand. Drunk on that rush of light and pleasure that came over me when we all sang together. Allie began to go out at night in her Captain America mask, to spy on friends, kids she knew from school. If she saw they were sick with the ’scale, she’d recruit them and their families. Tell them there was a way to stay alive. That the infection didn’t have to be a death sentence. We had a dozen new people coming in every week.

“Sarah sent me along with Allie to make sure she got back to camp in one piece. I took to dressing as a fireman, because I discovered that in a world full of things burning up, no one looks at a fireman twice. I couldn’t even remember my own name for most of June, I was so drunk on the Bright. I was just . . . just the Fireman.” He coughed, weakly. A fragrant puff of smoke blew from his mouth, turned into the ghost of a toy-sized fire truck, and dissolved.

“Show-off,” Harper said. “What happened next?”

“Sarah died,” he said, and bent forward and surprised Harper by kissing her nose. “The end.”